If you would like to participate, for recent full version WordPress blogs there’s a the 48 Hour Naked Day Plugin. For Pre 2.x versions of WordPress, the Naked Day WordPress Plugin will automatically disable your WordPress Theme’s stylesheet on April 5th, and turn it back on April 6th so you don’t have to.

If you are using a pre WordPress 2x version, and don’t want to use a WordPress Plugin, access your WordPress Theme directory and rename your style.css to styleback.css or some other name. Poof! No more stylesheet. Rename it back the next day.

Recent versions of WordPress will automatically reset to the Default WordPress Theme if no Theme is detected, which means changing the style.css will revert your Theme to the Default/Kubrick style. To override this redirection, you must use the 48 Hour Naked Day WordPress Plugin.

WordPress.com bloggers have a little more trouble participating.

If you are using the Sandbox and paid for the CSS Extra option, you can “turn off” your stylesheet by temporarily removing all the styles you’ve added to make your blog look beautiful.

What is CSS?

For those who have no idea what is going on, CSS means Cascading Style Sheet. In the “old” days of web page designs, the styles, the code that makes the background blue and the text black and the links green, were incorporated into the architecture code of the page. Every page had all of the design elements built right in.

This created heavily coded pages and a lot of problems. If you wanted to change the look of your website, you had to change the presentation and design elements on every page of your site. Not a problem if you have 10 web pages. A serious nightmare if you had 110 web pages.

Developers came up with a system that allowed the presentation styles to be removed from the architecture and placed in a single file which became the stylesheet, often named style.css. The architecture or HTML/XHMTL would check in the stylesheet to find out what each element’s instructions were on how it should look.

For instance, the heading tag, h3, would find instructions to make the font larger, bolder, and change the color to blue with a border underneath it to separate from the text. It would then follow the instructions in the stylesheet to make the heading look this way.

Instead of changing every style on every page of your website, you could make the changes in one file and every page would change. Web design implementation became faster, more consistent, and easier to manage and repair.

The change from a one stylesheet to many web pages system sped up the process of displaying a web page. Without all the bulky, redundant code in every web page, HTML pages were streamlined for only the architectural code, resulting in faster loading times.

To give credit to the power of the CSS stylesheet, April 5th has become CSS Naked Day, a day when everyone is reminded that without stylesheets, web pages would be big and bulky, slow loading, and a whole industry of web development and design would not exist as it does today.

Let’s get naked and pay tribute to those who helped the web become the creative place it is today.

CSS naked day does not only remind us about how useful CSS is, but also about content and accessibility: a site stripped of the nice CSS clothing shows its underlying structure. If the structure is bad (e.g. the blogroll div appears before the content div), the actual content might be hard to find.

I just though of this: how about a user-based CSS naked day? I can turn off all stylesheets from Firefox (view/page style/no style), so that instead of asking sites to strip, I can have see-through goggles all day long😉